Grade: B (Players’ Course)
Slope: 133(?) Length: 7100 yds Cost: $45 w/cart @ twilight
First I need to explain that my problem with the Players course is that my game has gotten quite decent with the exception of the occasional bad 3 or 4 iron off hardpack and sand-shot out of clay sand, so a hole has to be exceptionally tight with a very difficult green to pitch and putt on for me to really feel challenged by it. This is mostly short Bermuda grass on dry ground and that tends to grab irons more than usual, so *that* was a challenge…when I tried to play my least-reliable long irons. This course had a decent layout but definitely was more easy for me than hard, even playing the back tees it just was not much of a problem. I always play the back tees.
So my takeaway of the Players’ course is that it is a nice, modestly-challenging woods course WITH NO HOUSES. It was ok, but I definitely would have preferred it to be more of a challenge. Like a cute, well-mannered but boring girlfriend, you almost don’t even want to date her anymore, but you’ve paid for the movie tickets so you take her to the show. 18 holes like this. She does make you think every once in a while.
The Players’ course is tucked in between a big park & the Champions’ course, with the Champions’ course between it & a big lake. Its a nice, serene course with decent verticality & width, a decent degree of challenge for the intermediate player when played from the back (blue) tees. It has teeboxes for black/tournament tees but they weren’t set-up when I played & they aren’t marked on the scorecard anyway. It starts off fairly mundane but gets somewhat more interesting and challenging over the course of the round. It’s mainly a bangers’ course. The greens were big for the most part and looked like they had been aerated about a month before and still showed aeration holes but it was smooth and in good shape, no bare spots on the greens. Good action on the greens. A well-balanced course in terms of overall difficulty that isn’t too tough but is tough enough to keep you from going to sleep on it And it’s just a nice-looking course, with decent views over the lake on some tees and greens. Modest verticality, some blind approaches…more on the easy side than the hard side. This is not a difficult course but it can gum you, with some elevated tees & greens & plenty of shots over water. It does not look even close to as challenging as the Championship Course, which plays hard on the lake shore for 9 hole. But it’s not unplayably-easy. Kinda like doing laundry. It’s not hard but if you’re not careful then you can still fuck it up. And if you need to do laundry, then you do laundry. And there’s some minor gratification in doing it. But it’s not like I wake up and say, “man, I really want to go out and pay $50 to do laundry for 5 hours today!”.
I have a hard time seeing it as a slope 130+ course. Slope 120 from the blues is much more believable.
I gave it a higher rating for the fact that THERE ARE NO HOUSES ON THE COURSE. Otherwise it would have been at best a B- course. It just isn’t really that hard or challenging of a course. Maybe if you keep strict score. If you’re not losing balls into the woods, going +2 just to get on the green & 3-putting the greens, then you’re probably not going to think that the course is hard. I really had little trouble with it.
No planes, not much car noise at all, just a serene golf environment that could only be ruined by noisy interlopers trespassing on the course. So of course it was. But just for one teebox. I’m dying to play the Championship Course, though. But it’s hard to get on this course as a single, they only sell tee-times to 2-4 players on their website and due to CV restrictions they won’t place singles with larger groups. I’m not looking forward to going through that hassle again. If I could have played the Championship course this time, I would have. If I had thought of playing the front 9 on Players then switching over to the Championship course for the second 9, I would have. But the hard part as a single is just getting on a course. They suggest starting at 5 or so, but that leaves only 3 hours before dark. We started at 3:30, played straight through the turn & still barely finished before it was too dark to play.
I would rather not play the Players course again. It was barely worth playing even once. Maybe to experiment, or you’re desperate for a round on a 7000yd course with no houses on it. It just seemed disappointingly-easy, the kind of easy where you’re barely challenged. I mean literally it was occasionally modestly-difficult but often depressingly-easy. So no real desire to play it again, putting that much more pressure on getting on the Champions course. But this place is super-busy. As a single I would have a hard time getting on it when I wanted to get on it. it’s definitely better to reserve a tee-time online.
